Addressing CSOs’ Biggest Challenges

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Increasing sales is a priority for organizations. However, in a competitive environment that has many business leaders deciphering customers’ changing needs while being more cautious and tightening their purse strings, driving sales upward is gradually becoming a bigger challenge.

We strive to help our clients acquire new customers, or retain and grow their existing ones. Utilizing leading-edge technology, we have built an engagement engine with a two-pronged objective—first to use predictive analytics and algorithms to determine the next-best action, channel, or offer and second, apply an integrated marketing tool, develop custom tailored campaigns, and manage them. With this multichannel delivery platform we can assure that product offers and messaging are closely aligned with what the customer needs.

As part of our continuous efforts to help organizations increase sales, we realized that it’s imperative for us to understand what CSOs consider to be their main challenges. Understanding the CSOs’ pain points helps us better design our strategy and confirm that the evolution of our proprietary technology-enabled platform meets the needs of the marketplace. Recent interviews with high-ranking sales executives have allowed us to identify three key challenges for CSOs:

1. Increase Revenue:
This is the main focus and concern of CSOs. However, reaching the goal of increased revenue challenges them all. In the interviews, sales executives clearly expressed that they are focused on driving more revenue growth, through expanding relationships with their existing customers and also by acquiring new ones. This is an area that Revana has invested heavily in and we pride ourselves with helping our clients grow their business with the help of our services and solutions. One example is a national mobile communications company that wanted to increase its B2B lifecycle sales. Revana worked with this organization to develop a precise targeting mechanism for different segments, allowing for very relevant multichannel customer messaging, including dynamic email content. Not only did this strategy lead to a 40 percent decrease in wireless churn rates and almost doubled upgrades from the previous year, but the company also saw 20 percent growth in revenue per customer.

2. Diverse needs:
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to helping organizations improve their sales figures and achieve the success they’re striving for. Not only is each organization different, but CSOs themselves have varying capabilities. While some have very sophisticated processes and are well aligned with other departments, others have limited processes and suffer from lack of integration. These different stages on the maturity scale mean that each requires a different approach to address their needs and get them on the path to success. For this reason, we leverage our Revana Analytic Multichannel Platform TM (RAMP) in specific configurations for each client. At the beginning of our partnership with clients, we conduct a Revenue Performance Assessment which allows us to baseline performance, benchmark against industry best practices, establish the potential for revenue growth, and determine the RAMP configuration required for optimal results.

One major healthcare company, for example, was challenged with too few members engaged in its wellness programs. Leveraging historical member data, clinical data, and marketing response data, we were able to customize a multichannel digital marketing solution to send dynamic, event-triggered email marketing, and text messages to drive member engagement with real-time, personalized information. Bringing all data into a single source has led to a deeper understanding of the members themselves, improved personalized interactions with members, and a dramatic improvement in the speed to market of marketing campaigns.

3. A changing customer:
Today’s customers are savvy and communicate with the organizations they do business with through various channels and devices. A major change is that customers are doing a lot of research on their own before even contacting a company. It’s no longer enough to simply react to customers’ requests for information. Therefore, it’s imperative for sales executives to know where customers are in their buying journeys and reach out to them proactively at the right time and over their preferred channels. This requires investing in the right technologies to identify the moments of truth when an outreach is desirable and can improve the customer experience. Many of our clients have been stressing the need for an adaptive engine like RAMP that allows them to engage with customers in the way that makes the most sense.

A financial entity, for example, was experiencing customer attrition and needed to revamp its marketing efforts and target individual customers with the right message and at the most appropriate moments. After modeling customers based on their responsiveness to touches by different channels, we developed a six-channel engagement strategy and an automated channel frequency reporting solution. This has led to increased multi-touch and multi-channel engagement and reduced churn rates by up to 80 percent.

Although most CSOs have similar challenges, their companies are all different. It’s imperative to understand each one’s competitive environment, operational processes, and data management to design and build a joint solution and partnership model that ignites sales.